


everything has a loophole (you just have to know where to look)

by noblealice



Category: Now You See Me (Movies)
Genre: F/M, False Pregnancy, Grief/Mourning, POV Female Character, Pregnancy Scares, Reunions, Tarot, Unplanned Pregnancy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-11 05:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,407
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28139898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/noblealice/pseuds/noblealice
Summary: Where was Henley during the events of NYSM2? Why did she really leave The Four Horsemen?He scoffs a bit. “You always gotta have an out, don’t you?”She shrugs. She’s an escape artist. It is her specialty, after all.
Relationships: J. Daniel Atlas/Henley Reeves
Comments: 4
Kudos: 10
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	everything has a loophole (you just have to know where to look)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [seekingferret](https://archiveofourown.org/users/seekingferret/gifts).



> This fic deals with a character believing themselves to be pregnant and being wrong. There are emotions explored that could be hurtful for anyone who has lost a child. Please tread carefully and protect yourself.
> 
> Thank you to my wonderful beta, @shefliestrue, who made this less rambling and dealt with all my run-on sentences. All remaining mistakes are my own.

Stage magic is all about precision. If you get the angle wrong the front row can suddenly see you palm the card from the deck. So Henley worked tirelessly for years perfecting her chosen trade. In her line of work, she had to practice until it felt effortless. A mistake could derail not just her show, but her life.

Her period, on the other hand, was less precise. As she paced about her bedroom waiting for the cheap egg timer to ding, she really wished that she was one of those girls with perfectly predictable periods, it would have made this easier. Or at least easier to detect. As it was, she was late, _really_ late, and this was a variable The Eye had not planned for. This was not something _she_ had planned for.

She’s not a believer in _signs_ , not when she makes her livelihood using the unseen flaws in cold, hard steel and can watch first hand how the superstitious and gullible lose their fortunes to the likes of Merritt. But she bought a deck of Tarot cards along with the three pregnancy tests and while she has no idea how to read the cards, she’d done enough googling when she was gifted with the High Priestess a year and a half ago to know the Major Arcana cards when she sees them. She hasn’t unwrapped the deck yet, so it’s silently judging her along with two of the remaining pregnancy tests on the desk.

Before she’s ready for it, the timer dings from the bathroom counter and she has to steel herself to walk over to it.

She spent an inordinate amount of time studying the instructions as a way to delay this moment so she knows immediately what the two lines mean and how irrevocably she’s fucked up.

She immediately starts pacing again, everything on the desk forgotten as her thoughts swirl around her head. They slide into place swiftly, though. She’s always had an organized mind and the adrenaline that’s coursing through her now reminds her of the thrill of being on a stage.

She’s terrified but she’s also determined. For all the time it took to get the tests, all the waffling about whether or not to indulge this possibility...now that it’s a reality, she’s made up her mind.

She’s always been quick to make a decision and she leaps without looking back. She needs to leave The Four Horsemen.

\----

Henley tugs on one glove, securing it in place and she shifts on her feet. Her car is packed downstairs with her clothes, but she’s lingering in Danny’s apartment.

It’s the middle of the day and she knows she doesn’t have much time to make her exit, but this is harder than she anticipated. 

She still doesn’t feel comfortable with the tarot cards that she bought, their larger size unwieldy in her hands. It’s a shame to break up the deck when the pictures are so beautiful, but Henley isn’t one for saying goodbyes. She leaves a card in each of their apartments for them to find after she’s gone. 

For Jack, she leaves The Chariot because she sees his confidence growing every day and she wants him to know how proud of him she is. Merritt receives The Sun because he could do with a little prosperity in his life and she wishes him the best. For Dylan, she leaves The World because she can sense that the next trick he has planned will be just as impressive as the one that initially seemed so daunting to her so long ago.

It was hard to choose a card for Danny. She almost leaves him the Emperor, but his ego is big enough already and if he did any further research into the meaning of the card, he might try to find her. In the end, she leaves him The Hanged Man, placing it upside down on his bed. The fact that she’s denying him something leaves a twisting feeling in her stomach, but he needs to let her go so that she can become a new person.

For the millionth time, she wonders if she should tell him.

But he wouldn’t leave with her, not when he’s found such purpose here. She’s never seen him happier. He’d try to convince her to stay and that absolutely can’t happen. So she blows a kiss into his room and wipes away a tear as she leaves. If no one sees it, it’s like it never existed.

Magic.

\------

She followed Dylan one morning on his usual coffee run before work and watched him roll up an envelope and place it in the false bottom of a can of deodorant at the back of a shelf at a run down bodega. So she places The Empress into the same can and figures that The Eye can interpret it as they wish. She never pictures faces when she thinks of The Eye, just shadowy figures without feelings. She doubts they’d understand why she’s leaving and she doesn’t want to defend her actions to people she’s never met. Not when she’s taking such pains to avoid defending them to her closest friends.

\------

She walks into a diner two days later, muscles aching from the long drive. She smiles politely when she’s recognized, this time for her family connections and not her magic. 

“Not yet, I wanted to surprise them.” She says when asked if she’s talked to her parents recently.

She can’t wait to talk to her mom about everything. Things always seemed clearer after laying them out on her family’s kitchen table and she’s looking forward to clarity after a car ride full of doubts creeping in.

\------

She’s tapping her foot impatiently in the doctor’s waiting area. She’s never been good with sitting still so she’s moving a quarter across her gloved knuckles, over and over until a part of her is soothed. Periodically, she checks her new phone, but since she’s only given the number to her parents, there are no new messages from the people she wants to hear from.

A half hour later and she’s still tapping her foot, only this time she’s in an examination room and wearing a paper gown.

A man comes in wearing a lab coat and introduces himself with a toothy grin. 

“Call me Dr. Brad.” She has to fight rolling her eyes. He’s trying so hard, it reminds her of Danny back when they first met.

He begins reading from her chart, something about hCG levels and if she has a history of UTIs, kidney diseases or cysts. She just stares at him, uncomprehending.

“Must’ve been a false positive. Sometimes these tests can be flawed, but it could also mean that there’s something else we need to look into…” Dr. Brad continues on about further tests but it’s like the oxygen in the room has been sucked out and she’s living in a vacuum. She tries to breathe through her nose but it’s not working and suddenly she’s in one of her traps but with no exit. Everything feels too sharp and she has to gulp in air through her mouth.

It had felt so real...she had been so excited. Her world is slowly crushing in on itself and she has to remind herself to keep breathing. Time for grief will come later, when she’s out of this fluorescent hell of a doctor’s examination room.

Dr. Brad continues speaking and is writing a script on his little pad. Her vision blurs a bit with tears. She fights them back with a tried and true defence - anger. She thinks back to the two unused tests she must have thrown out and how she’s such an idiot. _Of course_ she uprooted and left her life with friends who cared and someone who maybe loved her for a mistake. Classic, daredevil Henley. She was chasing the thrill so hard she forgot to check the trick for a trap door. Now she’s been blinded by a misdirect and she feels like a fool.

\----

She drives to the cliffs on the edge of town. At this time of year, the sun is setting early. The sky is awash with the first hints of pinks and oranges and it washes over the small town below, painting everything with a rosy brush.

She can’t enjoy the sunset though, not with a grief so heavy it feels like it’s etched into her bones. She allows herself to break down and sob in the car until her nose is red and runny and her throat is hoarse and sore. She feels so alone.

She can’t go back. Not that she doesn’t think it could happen. Mostly everyone would welcome her with open arms. But she’s had a taste of a life outside of The Four Horsemen. A life where she can see her parents again and tell them about her day without lying or worrying about letting something slip. A life where she doesn’t have to be on her guard constantly and can start to think about a long term future. A life where love can exist unhindered by secrets and ambition.

She’s learned she wants that. To think further than the next trick, the next deserving victim of hubris or The Eye’s wrath. She wants to think about herself again.

\----

She has to plan first. It’s going to kill her to wait, but if she’s going to do this right she can’t jump immediately back on stage or revive her website. She can’t start small and build her following back up like she was doing before. As a former Horseman, she has multiple social media accounts dedicated to her and it’d be too big a distraction to try to live up to the Henley she let everyone see in those shows. The real Henley as she is now would be too different, too jaded. She had hope and faith back then. She had something bigger than herself to live for. Now she’s struggling to make it through a Tuesday.

She also has to work through her complicated emotions. It’ll take some time to de-tangle everything but she has the luxury of a free schedule now, as well as all her savings from The Four Horsemen’s shows. It’s time she got comfortable spending time alone. She’s surrounded herself with an adoring crowd for so long that she allowed the applause and cheers to replace what she’s clearly been longing for.

A family.

\----

Still, when not working with her therapist, she tries to keep tabs on her boys. There are reddit threads dedicated to unearthing the next trick and trying to debunk their past ones. So she gets an alert on her phone when they hijack the Octa show.

She’s enjoying herself, enjoying the theatricality. But then _they_ get hijacked and she watches the clusterfuck of the resulting chaos with her stomach in her shoes. After that, it’s almost impossible to keep tabs on the boys, and this mysterious new Lula, even when she knows their methods. They’re blocked off from her and it kills her to sit on her ass while they might be in trouble.

There’s an anonymous private message to her that tells her they’re alive and well cared for. She doesn't know whether to believe it, but she doesn't delete the message either.

When they resurface on New Years in London, it’s a relief and a curse. She can feel their energy through the screen but she was unprepared for the _want_ that crashes through her. She wants to be with them, wants to feel clever for hoodwinking someone deserving and wants most of all to celebrate a trick pulled off with her boys.

She wants to start the New Year without the sorrow that has filled her last few months. 

As she watches them hoot and holler, she thinks, maybe she already had a family. 

Maybe it’s time to go back to them.

\-----

She drives back to New York. The safe house is cleaned out like she expected, but she leaves The Star card in the dead drop in the bodega. She’s ready for a new beginning and she’s feeling optimistic for the first time in a long time. She hopes The Eye passes her message along to Danny.

\----

Five days later she gets her answer in the form of Danny’s voice at her buzzer and then his form walking toward her, his hair ridiculously short and it doesn't look any better than it did on her tv.

She can’t help smiling at him and thinks she sees a ghost of a smile on his face too, but the light in her front entrance way is tricky. Danny was always fun to needle, infuriating to argue with, and on their best days, easy to love. Trouble was, their best days were few and far between by the end. She couldn’t always read him, but that made it more rewarding when she could. She missed the challenge these past few months, more than anything else.

She ushers him into her small apartment because she’s not paying to heat the outdoors and she can see his breath tonight. He’s not even dressed for the weather, like he left too much of a hurry to bother.

“You gonna say something? Because I’ve got dinner in the oven that I’ll need to take out eventually.”

He scoffs a bit. “You always gotta have an out, don’t you?”

She shrugs. She’s an escape artist. It is her specialty, after all.

“You look good.” He says, but she knows better than to relax her guard. 

“Thanks. You look jetlagged.”

He scuffs a toe on her welcome mat, but his eyes never leave hers.

“I saw the show. It was spectacular.” She says to fill the air between them. He’s staring at her _so hard_ she’s afraid she might confess all her sins.

“Really? I felt it was missing something.”

“Some _thing_ , huh?” She crosses her arms and leans against the wall.

“Some _one_.” He takes a step toward her and she doesn’t flinch.

She smiles again, brilliant and bright. He smiles back, a real one this time, and it’s better than being on stage, better than successfully pulling off a series of tricks a year in the making. Better even than seeing her face on Times Square.

It’s grasping his hand in hers before taking a step into the unknown.

It’s finding her family.

**Author's Note:**

> This fic has taken many turns to get here. With no specific prompt I floundered a bit until I realized I could finally explore one of the most interesting characters in the film (to me) and why she was absent from the second movie (it always rubbed me the wrong way that she 'lost faith and didn't want to keep waiting' and asked to leave The Four Horsemen). I wanted to keep her departure being Henley's choice but I thought that a more practical reason would be if she thought she was pregnant (as Isla Fischer was during the filming of NYSM2) and wanted to protect her baby.
> 
> This started out as a 5+1 Things fic (Five Times Henley Felt Trapped and One Time She Didn't) and part of it explored her pre-movie relationship with Danny as his assistant. But when I got to the pregnancy scare I realized this needed more depth and that Henley didn't feel trapped by a baby, that she felt liberated and full of possibilities. I even wrote a draft where she really was pregnant and when Danny finds her, he meets his kid for the first time. But I dislike this trope and I think if Henley had nine months to think about it, that she would have told Danny eventually. So she 'loses' the baby, which I tried to approach with sensitivity, having never been in that position myself. My apologies if I caused harm.
> 
> I also apologize for my horrible use of Tarot symbolism. I know even less then Henley and I'm sure that experienced Tarot readers/users are rolling their eyes at my attempts to muddle through with summarized Wikipedia interpretations.
> 
> My last note is to @seekingferret. I'm hoping this story is adequate. Happy Yuletide!


End file.
